Bob Geldof was having dinner with his agent and they were talking about him being offered the lead in Pink Floyd's The Wall movie. They finished dinner and then went outside and flagged a taxi. In the taxi Bob Geldof went on about how he didn't want to do the movie and how much he hated Pink Floyd. When the cab driver finished his shift he called his brother and told him what Geldof had been saying. The cab driver's brother was Roger Waters. Now that's a coincidence.

poot_rootbeer:I wish I were a 3D video game developer, or at least someone who plays such games a lot, because then I might understand what the term "skybox" means when presented entirely devoid of context, as it was here.

I wish we had a massive computer network, complete with sites dedicated to collecting and sharing human knowledge, so that, were I confused about some technical term or other, I could simply run a search and find out what it means.

poot_rootbeer:I might understand what the term "skybox" means when presented entirely devoid of context, as it was here.

You place a "box" over the entire game area, then apply the sky texture on the inside. Think of it like the Truman Show. From the inside it appears that you can see sky in all directions, but you're really looking at the inside of a box with sky painted on it.

This is a Cracked photoplasty contest so all of these images are reader submitted. First place is like $20 or something. This was a weird topic because usually they're your traditional Photoshop contests a la fark (e.g. Photoshop a scene from a PG movie to make it R rated).

Yeah, it was one of the earliest examples of memory limitations altering the game's lore, along with the entire moonbase mission being scrapped. The devs set out to recreate Liberty Island true to life, but the texture size limitation on most video cards meant that you usually had to have a repeating skybox texture for it to have any real definition at all. There simply was no way to put in the Twin Towers and make them both unique on the skyline AND anything but a vague blur. Since the Statue of Liberty was already supposed to have been decapitated by a terrorist bomb attack, the Warren Spector and Harvey Smith decided that they could attribute other missing New York landmarks to more acts of terrorism.

To be fair though, it wasn't really a major plot point. In-game lore references it very briefly in a pityingly small number of in-game text items that you'll only find if you explore every single corner of the game and read every newspaper and book scattered on a desk or buried under a trash bag.